Pitchfork's Adam Ward with a piece on the poignant turn-of-millennium associations of 128 kbps, 64 kbps, even 58 kbps...
"For a certain point on the timeline of music discovery, quality wasn’t a defining factor. In the dawn of mp3 players, the big draw was the amount of music you could carry with you.... Low bit-rate mp3s colored the experience of music discovery in the early 21st century.... Especially considering the original iPod had only 5 gigabytes of hard drive space, listeners wanted to bring as many songs along with them as possible. 128 kbps used to be the baseline... I’ve come to love these awful quality files. In most cases, listening to their lossless versions just doesn’t sound right to me..... With each layer of compression you can practically hear the thousands of others who shared and copied the same mp3, like a destructive digital fingerprint. Songs ripped from CDs, uploaded to streaming sites, shared via P2P, and burned back to a CD mixtape have incredible amounts of distortion, something akin to today’s over-compressed Instagram memes. ....
"....There’s a certain point where the desire for flawless sound is outweighed by your nostalgia for hearing it in a familiar way. It explains the near universal admiration for a crackling vinyl record, or the recent fascination with VHS distortion....
"The underwater compression of a low-quality mp3 is our generation’s vinyl crackle or skipping CD. It’s a limitation of technology that defines the experience of an era...... When we talk about the coldness of digital music in comparison to the "warmth" of vinyl, we neglect to highlight the peculiar characteristics of digital compression."
Monday, September 21, 2015
Sunday, September 13, 2015
recreativiTV
Phillip Maciak at LA Review of Books on Mr Robot, season 1:
".... I see Rubicon when I watch Mr. Robot, but that’s not a bad thing, nor is it the only thing that’s true about my relationship to the show as a spectator. That’s just how it works: networks of inference and allusion. It’s not downgrading Mr. Robot’s originality or Esmail’s creative achievement to suggest that, in an era of influential TV series, Mr. Robot is maybe the most visibly and precociously influenced series on the air.
"Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he lived in a “retrospective age,” that “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes.” And he demanded that a new art, a new vision of God and nature, be forged in the nineteenth century. But Ralph knew as well as anybody that “new” is a relative concept. Everything that is is a recombination of what’s old, what’s known. The impossibility of newness is not a failure so much as the definition of existence. We — along with our loved ones and our objects and our art — are a reassemblage of what once was. We can’t behold anything new, but we can hope to see through new eyes that which is newly arranged and that which has been here for a long time.
"So a TV series identified by its influences is not just okay, it’s natural. In other words, Mr. Robot’s pastiche quality may be its defining trait, but that doesn’t mean it’s negatively defined by indebtedness. Just because a work owes something to another work doesn’t mean that it’s plagiarism or hackery. Nor does it mean that a pastiche with this kind of dynamic associative energy and annotative sophistication isn’t, in and of itself, somewhat unique to cable television. You can see the Kubrick and the Scorsese and, once someone points it out, even the Dunham, but it’s neither all you see nor the limit of what you might be able to see if you look hard enough.
"But given what Ralph said earlier, given that anything we watch likely consists of a series of revisions, variations, sometimes even outright thefts, and given that nobody seems to mind the show’s nods to other media, why are we so concerned with Mr. Robot’s influences? Why ask Sam Esmail what he’s watching when we only come upon that kind of information by accident talking to Vince Gilligan or Jenji Kohan? Television is built on this kind of recycling. The Sopranos and Deadwood are both genre pieces as derivative as they are innovative, every procedural borrows from every other procedural, most of the bread-and-butter series surrounding Mr. Robot on USA are cut from the same sunwashed linen cloth. What’s so shocking about Mr. Robot all of a sudden?"....
Well I had not noticed all these plagiarisms, borrowings, reworkings in Mr. Robot ... except for the big one - Fight Club - which seemed glaring to me, but not quite enough to put me off enjoying the show a lot
enjoyed this show a lot, despite a queasy feeling - increasingly common with the new breed of digi-maximalist TV series - of being led up the narrative garden path (see True Detective as prime offender, but a dozen others could also spring to mind)
the curse of Plot-itis, aka Lost-itis, - after that classic "worra loada cobblers" make-it-up-as-we-go-along series
narrative maximalism: engendered by the new structures of watching (binge watching, watching-on-demand)
there's two kinds of narrative maximalism - synchronic and diachronic, vertical and horizontal:
1/ Synchronic / Vertical : scrofulous proliferation of subplots, characters, etc - a cake with too many layers, too much icing and sprinkles ... exhausting the brain's capacity to keep up with and contain so many strata of characterisation and subnarrative
2/ Diachronic / Horizontal : too many twists, too many turns - an unnatural elongation of storyline, way beyond being convincing.... straining one's credulity, exhausting one's patience.... one's memory capacity even (how did this story start? where's it been?)
Some series have both going on - Game of Thrones
Alan Kirby pointed towards this in Digimodernism, the "onwardness and endlessness" of digital cultural products, their relentlessness and propulsiveness - the infinite extendability of narrative - a quality discernible equally in videogames and in series fiction (Potter, Thrones, etc) (and movie sequels, prequels, etc)
where the consumer sacrifices plausibility, sense, etc for the satisfactions of continuation, of neverendingness
I miss the temporally-limited, characterologically focused TV series - the confined study of a relatively small number of humans interacting within a fairly restricted framework and duration ... series that allowed themselves to culminate after perhaps a dozen episodes (maybe less).... maybe at most, two seasons of the series.... then, the work done, the point made... the parties involved disperse to other projects
hooray for Show Me A Hero, which kept it to just six episodes, divided into three meaty portions.... focused on a manageable set of characters .... and, importantly, accepted the historical facts
(unlikely the increasingly fictional and liberty-taking Masters of Sex - which i suspect for digimodernist/digimaximalst reasons is forced to make stuff up, adulterate the truth, which otherwise would be just too plain, too uneventful for the viewer demands, the narrative strictures, of contemporary television-making )
".... I see Rubicon when I watch Mr. Robot, but that’s not a bad thing, nor is it the only thing that’s true about my relationship to the show as a spectator. That’s just how it works: networks of inference and allusion. It’s not downgrading Mr. Robot’s originality or Esmail’s creative achievement to suggest that, in an era of influential TV series, Mr. Robot is maybe the most visibly and precociously influenced series on the air.
"Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he lived in a “retrospective age,” that “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes.” And he demanded that a new art, a new vision of God and nature, be forged in the nineteenth century. But Ralph knew as well as anybody that “new” is a relative concept. Everything that is is a recombination of what’s old, what’s known. The impossibility of newness is not a failure so much as the definition of existence. We — along with our loved ones and our objects and our art — are a reassemblage of what once was. We can’t behold anything new, but we can hope to see through new eyes that which is newly arranged and that which has been here for a long time.
"So a TV series identified by its influences is not just okay, it’s natural. In other words, Mr. Robot’s pastiche quality may be its defining trait, but that doesn’t mean it’s negatively defined by indebtedness. Just because a work owes something to another work doesn’t mean that it’s plagiarism or hackery. Nor does it mean that a pastiche with this kind of dynamic associative energy and annotative sophistication isn’t, in and of itself, somewhat unique to cable television. You can see the Kubrick and the Scorsese and, once someone points it out, even the Dunham, but it’s neither all you see nor the limit of what you might be able to see if you look hard enough.
"But given what Ralph said earlier, given that anything we watch likely consists of a series of revisions, variations, sometimes even outright thefts, and given that nobody seems to mind the show’s nods to other media, why are we so concerned with Mr. Robot’s influences? Why ask Sam Esmail what he’s watching when we only come upon that kind of information by accident talking to Vince Gilligan or Jenji Kohan? Television is built on this kind of recycling. The Sopranos and Deadwood are both genre pieces as derivative as they are innovative, every procedural borrows from every other procedural, most of the bread-and-butter series surrounding Mr. Robot on USA are cut from the same sunwashed linen cloth. What’s so shocking about Mr. Robot all of a sudden?"....
Well I had not noticed all these plagiarisms, borrowings, reworkings in Mr. Robot ... except for the big one - Fight Club - which seemed glaring to me, but not quite enough to put me off enjoying the show a lot
enjoyed this show a lot, despite a queasy feeling - increasingly common with the new breed of digi-maximalist TV series - of being led up the narrative garden path (see True Detective as prime offender, but a dozen others could also spring to mind)
the curse of Plot-itis, aka Lost-itis, - after that classic "worra loada cobblers" make-it-up-as-we-go-along series
narrative maximalism: engendered by the new structures of watching (binge watching, watching-on-demand)
there's two kinds of narrative maximalism - synchronic and diachronic, vertical and horizontal:
1/ Synchronic / Vertical : scrofulous proliferation of subplots, characters, etc - a cake with too many layers, too much icing and sprinkles ... exhausting the brain's capacity to keep up with and contain so many strata of characterisation and subnarrative
2/ Diachronic / Horizontal : too many twists, too many turns - an unnatural elongation of storyline, way beyond being convincing.... straining one's credulity, exhausting one's patience.... one's memory capacity even (how did this story start? where's it been?)
Some series have both going on - Game of Thrones
Alan Kirby pointed towards this in Digimodernism, the "onwardness and endlessness" of digital cultural products, their relentlessness and propulsiveness - the infinite extendability of narrative - a quality discernible equally in videogames and in series fiction (Potter, Thrones, etc) (and movie sequels, prequels, etc)
where the consumer sacrifices plausibility, sense, etc for the satisfactions of continuation, of neverendingness
I miss the temporally-limited, characterologically focused TV series - the confined study of a relatively small number of humans interacting within a fairly restricted framework and duration ... series that allowed themselves to culminate after perhaps a dozen episodes (maybe less).... maybe at most, two seasons of the series.... then, the work done, the point made... the parties involved disperse to other projects
hooray for Show Me A Hero, which kept it to just six episodes, divided into three meaty portions.... focused on a manageable set of characters .... and, importantly, accepted the historical facts
(unlikely the increasingly fictional and liberty-taking Masters of Sex - which i suspect for digimodernist/digimaximalst reasons is forced to make stuff up, adulterate the truth, which otherwise would be just too plain, too uneventful for the viewer demands, the narrative strictures, of contemporary television-making )
retroquotes #271112
retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time
“Art arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking color from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness....
"... language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring of the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School and the last form of Greek Art fallen into deliquescence; but such is the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a person who does not know his own needs. Contrary to classical style, it admits of backgrounds where the specters of superstition, the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of night, remorse which leaps out and falls back noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day, and all the soul in its deepest depths and innermost caverns conceals the darkness, deformity, and horror, move together nervously”
(via S.C. Hickman at Dark Ecologies on Posthuman Decadence)
Friday, August 28, 2015
Corbynmania - retro politics, or NOW!ist politics? (updated SEPTEMBER 10)
Contestants for the leadership of the Labour Party, and media commentators, are in a free fire war to tar the side they don't like with the concept of "retro politics" - accusing each other (or in the case of most media pundits, castigating Jeremy Corbyn) with attempting to turn the clock back, being a throwback, being an Eighties revivalist, a restorationist (reinstating Clause IV) etc. Years of retrogade infamy or historic defeat - 1983, 1997, 1992, 1979 - are being hurled back and forth as damning instances of replay and reenactment.
A quite different argument is this one made by Matthew d'Ancona from a few weeks ago in which he presents Corbyn (and Trump) as figureheads for a kind of NOW!-ist politics that offers a salve for the injuries caused by globalisation / neoliberalism.
D'Ancona starts by saying that Liz Kendall is justified in labelling JC "as a retro-politician, peddling 'Bennism reheated, a throwback to the past … We are the party of the future not a preservation society'.” ....
But then he argues that "such attacks slide off the Teflon Trot because they misconstrue the role of history in contemporary culture..... When Blair announced his intention to transform his party, he simply renamed it New Labour. When the freshly elected Tory leader, David Cameron, wanted to unsettle his veteran opponent at his first PMQs in December 2005, he said of Blair: “He was the future once.” Yet we seem to have moved on even from that division between nostalgia and modernity. Corbyn’s appeal to his party is not diminished by the association of his ideological position with almost every disaster that befell Labour in the 80s. According to the new rules, the candidate’s past is not only struck from the record but irrelevant."
This is because
".... a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure. To borrow the jargon of semiotics, it is “synchronic” (cross-sectional) rather than “diachronic” (part of a serial narrative, with a before and after). It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called “the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today’s voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise.
"They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream. The contents of that stream are not ideologically coherent but they are identifiable. Corbyn, for instance, speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all, no longer citizens but the puppets of planetary corporations that are accountable to none."
JC's rise is "a response to a very specific, vivid sense of alarm. In countenance and bearing alone, Corbyn soothes that pain"...
"History did end, but not the way that Francis Fukuyama meant. It was simply absorbed into an all-encompassing present.... In the Babel of the digital nanosecond, voters are driven less by pristine moral imperatives than by the crushing weight of the immediate and of proximate stimuli. Successful politicians of tomorrow will be those who stretch out a hand and offer an analgesic. That’s why Corbyn is winning. He understands that the axiom of our era is not “Lest we forget” but “Make it stop”.
Cross-reference perhaps with Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
(which I started to read a few years ago - but have not - boom-boom - had enough time to finish)
Yet another time-based argument about Corbyn's appeal is the "lost future" / "restoring the future" tack - the idea of going back to go forward (in which privatising the railways and the energy companies was the retrogressive step, etc etc - neo-liberalism being a new Victorianism - so why wouldn't we want to pick up again where the social democratic project was paused / sent into reverse? Renatioanlise the utilities, de-privative the NHS, etc). A Seventies revival that would actually be more advanced and forward-moving than the post-socialism of Thatcher-Major-Blair-Brown-Coalition-Cameron.
A sort of hauntological argument, even .... Corbyn's beard and clothes reassuringly reminiscent of a kindly teacher you might have had in the 70s or 80s, earnestly attempting to speak to the kids on their own level, talking about loving Dark Side of the Moon. The ghost of an Open University lecturer. A figure from a Look Around You bygone era.
Not to be outdone or left out of all the "backward" accusations flying hither and thither (but mostly in his direction) Corbyn has himself accused the Tories of 1979 revivalism
"Parliament can feel like living in a time warp at the best of times, but this government is not just replaying 2010, but taking us back to 1979: ideologically committed to rolling back the state, attacking workers’ rights and trade union protection, selling off public assets and extending the sell-off to social housing."
Update 8/29/15 - missed this prime slice of of retro spectre argumentation from last week's Guardian's by Rosie Fletcher, a young woman who sees her Corbynmania as a response to the fierce urgency of NOW - how can she be nostalgic for a moment she wasn't even alive for?
A quite different argument is this one made by Matthew d'Ancona from a few weeks ago in which he presents Corbyn (and Trump) as figureheads for a kind of NOW!-ist politics that offers a salve for the injuries caused by globalisation / neoliberalism.
D'Ancona starts by saying that Liz Kendall is justified in labelling JC "as a retro-politician, peddling 'Bennism reheated, a throwback to the past … We are the party of the future not a preservation society'.” ....
But then he argues that "such attacks slide off the Teflon Trot because they misconstrue the role of history in contemporary culture..... When Blair announced his intention to transform his party, he simply renamed it New Labour. When the freshly elected Tory leader, David Cameron, wanted to unsettle his veteran opponent at his first PMQs in December 2005, he said of Blair: “He was the future once.” Yet we seem to have moved on even from that division between nostalgia and modernity. Corbyn’s appeal to his party is not diminished by the association of his ideological position with almost every disaster that befell Labour in the 80s. According to the new rules, the candidate’s past is not only struck from the record but irrelevant."
This is because
".... a quite different form of politics is emerging, with a quite different structure. To borrow the jargon of semiotics, it is “synchronic” (cross-sectional) rather than “diachronic” (part of a serial narrative, with a before and after). It is governed by what Martin Luther King, in a very different context, called “the fierce urgency of now”. It recognises that today’s voters are the children of the digital Big Bang, bombarded with an unprecedented blitz of information, data and noise.
"They exist in bubbles of digital mayhem, less bothered by the future and the past than by getting through life moment to moment. Their universe is defined by the immediate and the deafening data stream. The contents of that stream are not ideologically coherent but they are identifiable. Corbyn, for instance, speaks to the fear that global capitalism, for all its success, has made serfs of us all, no longer citizens but the puppets of planetary corporations that are accountable to none."
JC's rise is "a response to a very specific, vivid sense of alarm. In countenance and bearing alone, Corbyn soothes that pain"...
"History did end, but not the way that Francis Fukuyama meant. It was simply absorbed into an all-encompassing present.... In the Babel of the digital nanosecond, voters are driven less by pristine moral imperatives than by the crushing weight of the immediate and of proximate stimuli. Successful politicians of tomorrow will be those who stretch out a hand and offer an analgesic. That’s why Corbyn is winning. He understands that the axiom of our era is not “Lest we forget” but “Make it stop”.
Cross-reference perhaps with Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
(which I started to read a few years ago - but have not - boom-boom - had enough time to finish)
Yet another time-based argument about Corbyn's appeal is the "lost future" / "restoring the future" tack - the idea of going back to go forward (in which privatising the railways and the energy companies was the retrogressive step, etc etc - neo-liberalism being a new Victorianism - so why wouldn't we want to pick up again where the social democratic project was paused / sent into reverse? Renatioanlise the utilities, de-privative the NHS, etc). A Seventies revival that would actually be more advanced and forward-moving than the post-socialism of Thatcher-Major-Blair-Brown-Coalition-Cameron.
A sort of hauntological argument, even .... Corbyn's beard and clothes reassuringly reminiscent of a kindly teacher you might have had in the 70s or 80s, earnestly attempting to speak to the kids on their own level, talking about loving Dark Side of the Moon. The ghost of an Open University lecturer. A figure from a Look Around You bygone era.
Not to be outdone or left out of all the "backward" accusations flying hither and thither (but mostly in his direction) Corbyn has himself accused the Tories of 1979 revivalism
"Parliament can feel like living in a time warp at the best of times, but this government is not just replaying 2010, but taking us back to 1979: ideologically committed to rolling back the state, attacking workers’ rights and trade union protection, selling off public assets and extending the sell-off to social housing."
Update 8/29/15 - missed this prime slice of of retro spectre argumentation from last week's Guardian's by Rosie Fletcher, a young woman who sees her Corbynmania as a response to the fierce urgency of NOW - how can she be nostalgic for a moment she wasn't even alive for?
"These patrician warnings that Corbyn only serves to drag Labour backwards serve to make me, as a young voter, feel patronised and unwanted. I had never considered that Corbyn was a throwback until people started banging on about how bad the 1980s were, seemingly forgetting that we are not actually electing a leader to be sent back in time into the exact circumstances of Jim Callaghan’s resignation. You’d think Michael Foot himself was running, attending debates in a hammer and sickle-print donkey jacket, from the amount we’ve been talking about him.
We are warned not to look to the past from people looking desperately to 1997. The Blair landslide is itself old enough to vote; it’s going round Ikea buying saucepans and looking forward to taking on £45,000 of student debt. The anti-Corbyn message clings to the past as much as it accuses his supporters of so doing.
But instead we are looking to the future. The passion and enthusiasm in these Labour members and supporters doesn’t long for the Good Old Days, whenever they may have been, but looks forward. I don’t view Corbyn as some kind of vintage nostalgia, tied up in bunting with a Keep Calm and Renationalise the Railways poster. He offers progress, not the safe stasis of the other candidates."
Her passion riled up the Ghost of 1997 himself for one last ditch blast of capitalist-realist reasoning, whose message is "resign to yourself to dreamless existence". Opening sentences:
"There is a new phenomenon in politics or perhaps the revival of an old one. But whatever it is, it is powerful.
Update 9/4/2015
More time-based "who's really the throwback" rhetoric in this Independent piece which draws analogies between Corbyn and Thatcher as conviction-led politicians on the fringe of their party who come in and take it over - to the consternation of the party establishment / "grandees", who fear that their new leader is an "unelectable extremist" - but in fact set it on the path of victory and nation-transformation / political-consensus reshaping for decades:
Update September 10 2015
Via the Guardian, a late contender that takes the biscuit:
Jon Cruddas tells Cruddas told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he's worried that a Corbyn-led Labour party "might turn into an early 80s tribute act, a Trotskyist tribute act, which has a culture around it which is very hostile to anybody who disagrees. "
More time-based "who's really the throwback" rhetoric in this Independent piece which draws analogies between Corbyn and Thatcher as conviction-led politicians on the fringe of their party who come in and take it over - to the consternation of the party establishment / "grandees", who fear that their new leader is an "unelectable extremist" - but in fact set it on the path of victory and nation-transformation / political-consensus reshaping for decades:
"The past is a comforting place, but it’s the Blairites who seem to be living there, rather than Corbyn. People who for so long believed wearing a business suit immediately conferred electoral credibility.
They seem shell-shocked by Corbynmania, but really theirs is a failure to understand that politics in Britain is being reconfigured by a bewildering array of forces: austerity, Cameron, Ukip, the SNP, immigration and inequality, to name a few. Reading off a fading Xeroxed script faxed to them in 1993 by Peter Mandelson just ain’t going to cut it anymore."
Update September 10 2015
Via the Guardian, a late contender that takes the biscuit:
Jon Cruddas tells Cruddas told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he's worried that a Corbyn-led Labour party "might turn into an early 80s tribute act, a Trotskyist tribute act, which has a culture around it which is very hostile to anybody who disagrees. "
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